Redmond, Washington — Barely four months after Microsoft Corp. introduced Bing search engine, seeking to gain market share from Google Inc., unveiled a twist over the Internet search experience on Monday by releasing a beta version of Visual Search, which allows Web surfers to search using image galleries instead of text links at the TechCrunch50 conference.
The new feature displays a pretty Silverlight-powered fly-in thumbnail images for only 50 specific search results, which will be increased in the future, the Visual Search feature provides an alternative to lists of blue links that are often displayed by search engines when searching such as “Digital cameras,” “New cars,” “MLB players,” and “Top songs.”
Visual Search was launched Monday by Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president at Microsoft, at Tech Crunch 50, a tech conference in San Francisco.
Bing Visual Search uploads a page with visual thumbnails of what you are looking for. This example shows yoga poses. (Credit: Microsoft )
The Visual Search feature displays the real value of having a search engine that blends structured data into its results. In a demo, the aspects looks extremely good, and search results link to other precise functioning Bing search results pages and widgets, like shopping pages and sports player stats boxes.
“How many times have you seen a movie trailer and forgotten the name of it the next day? You go online to search for it but you cannot seem to find the movie with “what’s-his-name” in it anywhere but you can picture the actor in your head?” asked Todd Schwartz, a group product manager at Microsoft, in a blog post. “Now to find that movie you were looking for, click on ‘Movies’ and scroll through the imagery to find ‘what’s-his-name.’ Now that you found it, hover your mouse over the movie to view details including title, rating, reviews, and how much it grossed at the box office, all right under the search box.”
With Visual Search, Microsoft may have delivered a pretty cool feature to Bing that gives it a leg up on Google in their ongoing search war.
When the users enters a search query for “digital camera” and click on “visualize,” the Bing software will spread out a pack of images. The choices can be contracted by selecting different terms from a menu, Stefan Weitz, director of Bing Search, said in an interview last week.
“This is a big advance,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “If the technology works as well as we are hearing so far, [Visual Search] should give Microsoft some formidable ammunition to use against Google in the search wars.
“Humans process visuals faster than text and when we are looking for something specific, it is much, much faster to pick what we want out of a group of pictures versus lines of text describing the pictures,” he said. “If Microsoft delivers true visual search capabilities, this is something that might close the gap between them and Google in both search and advertising revenue.”
To preview Visual Search topics visit this Bing page which should be live by the time you read this.
Microsoft said that Visual Search will be embedded into Bing over the next few weeks with some users seeing it before others. But the beta release is restricted to a specific set of topics — such as movies, celebrities, music, politicians and sports — and is by no means comprehensive, Olds added.
“Bing may have pulled ahead in the short term with visual search, but it is not a home run,” he said. “Early reports say that the Visual Search is limited to a specific set of topics. This is not dynamic visual searching but it is a great feature and a potential game changer if Microsoft can quickly expand their capabilities. If they can do that, then they have a good shot at pulling users away from Google for at least some searches.”
Although, by the end of September, company representatives say, the feature will be live to all. The move comes as Microsoft has seen reasonable success with Bing. Since its introduction in May Microsoft’s Bing search market share in the U.S. increased meagerly in July to 9 percent, according comScore, a market research firm. Google owns 65 percent of the search market compared to Yahoo with 19 percent (Bing and Yahoo’s combined market share is 27 percent).